Your strategies are those that optimize for jobs a monkey to do: "I need someone to flip this burger or turn this wrench". Paying for cheap labor, you get cheap

Your strategies are those that optimize for jobs a monkey to do: "I need someone to flip this burger or turn this wrench". Paying for cheap labor, you get cheap results. I've seen this time and again across many different industries. When it comes to knowledge / skill based work, the high end of the spectrum is a multiple of value over the low end. Sometimes that's 1.5x, sometimes it's 10x, sometimes it's 100+x. It doesn't matter how many scientists you hired if you didn't hire the first one (or one of the first ones) to create a working and marketable COVID vaccine, for example. It doesn't matter how many engineers you hired at 50k/year if you didn't hire the guy for 2 million / year that finally got self-driving cars working. At a less extreme scale, it doesn't matter how many junior devs you hire to do the work if one senior dev could have done it faster and with less headaches, which happens all the time in tech. On a daily basis, in my experience at multiple tech jobs. And let's also remember that market salaries selects for talent before the talent is even there; today's smartest students that want a paycheck go for tech careers (and some other fields). If tech stops paying well, those people go into other fields, and you don't even get the option to hire that 10xer because they don't exist. If you stop paying well but your competitors continue to pay top dollar, your competitors will leave you in the dust.